A Quote by Donald Barthelme

People always like to hear that they're under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they'd feel if they were told they weren't under stress.

Donald Barthelme

Quote Topics

Always Better Feel Feel Better Hear Imagine Like Makes People Stress Them Under Stress Were

Quote Author

Donald Barthelme
American - Novelist
April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989

The American way of stress is comparable to Freud's 'beloved symptom', his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.

Florence King

People don't know how to deal with stress and depression, so they're nasty to other people because it makes them feel better about themselves.

Kate Nash

One thing I hear a lot is that people feel less stressed out after they watch 'Gourmet Makes.' There's a transference of their stress onto me.

Claire Saffitz

There's such a thing as good stress and bad stress. Bad stress is when somebody else stresses you out, and good stress is when you stress yourself out over something you want to accomplish, which makes you want to perfect it.

Denzel Curry

I deal with stress in two ways because there are two kinds of stress. There's stress that you can take care of and there's stress that you can't. The first one, I take care of it as fast as possible, because putting it off always makes it worse. Things that I can't fix? I think about the fact that I can't fix them. I think about why I can't fix them and I come to terms with the fact that this is a problem that I'm not going to overcome and that the world is not a wish granting factory.

Hank Green

Post-traumatic stress, that's why the soldiers need marijuana, is for their mental health. It makes them feel better so that they don't have the horrors of war in their mind all the time. And the government won't allow them to have it, because it's illegal - federally. It's absurd.

Jesse Ventura

People associate hard work and overload with stress. But, like suffering, stress is complicated. Bad stress is stress that a system can't endure without suffering damage. It is unplanned, uncontrolled, allows no time for rest and recovery, and exceeds the capacity of the system to adjust to it. As the popular phrase suggests, it burns people out and, over time, it can decimate an entire workforce.

Edward Hallowell

Exercise mitigates the effects of stress - and stress, we know, shortens telomeres. In fact, early studies indicate that stress reduction techniques like meditation help people maintain the length of their telomeres.

Elizabeth Blackburn

I think that a lot of people are in love with stress. It's the dirty little secret of Western civilization. People often mistake stress for fuel.... to me, stress is just another bad drug that I don't want to do.

Jerry Stahl

With the high stress of life many people find that their mind is constantly racing. They cannot stop from thinking even during time away from work or school, when they'd like to be relaxing. Subsequently, they may also feel associated physical tension in their bodies. In this case, the mind and the body are very closely connected to the stress response.

Tim McCarthy

Stress is something that makes you feel you can't be yourself.

Penney Peirce

We create stress for ourselves because you feel like you have to do it. You have to. I don't feel that anymore

Oprah Winfrey

In gymnastics, smaller will always be better in many ways. The stress in the head, that will be the same for all. But the stress on the body and the concussions it must endure, that will always be easier for the little ones.

Bela Karolyi

At a lot of college graduations, you'll hear people say, 'Follow your passions,' and that is important, but no one talks about the stress of not having enough money, the issues of debt, and the issues of work stress.

Sal Khan

Our brains are wired such that it's difficult to take action until we feel at least some level of this emotional state. In fact, performance peaks under the heightened activation that comes with moderate levels of stress. As long as the stress isn't prolonged, it's harmless.